Mass surveillance is about control. It’s promulgators may well claim, and even believe, that it is about control for the greater good, a control that is needed to keep a cap on disorder, to be fully vigilant to the next threat. But in a context of rampant political corruption, widening economic inequalities, and escalating resource stress due to climate change and energy volatility, mass surveillance can become a tool of power to merely perpetuate itself, at the public’s expense.

A major function of mass surveillance that is often overlooked is that of knowing the adversary to such an extent that they can be manipulated into defeat. The problem is that the adversary is not just terrorists. It’s you and me. To this day, the role of information warfare as propaganda has been in full swing, though systematically ignored by much of the media.

Here, INSURGE INTELLIGENCE exposes how the Pentagon Highlands Forum’s co-optation of tech giants like Google to pursue mass surveillance, has played a key role in secret efforts to manipulate the media as part of an information war against the American government, the American people, and the rest of the world: to justify endless war, and ceaseless military expansionism.

MIIS CySec is formally partnered with the Pentagon’s Highlands Forum through an MoU signed between the provost and Forum president Richard O’Neill, while the initiative itself is funded by George C. Lee: the Goldman Sachs executive who led the billion dollar valuations of Facebook, Google, eBay, and other tech companies.

Cooper’s eye-opening paper is no longer available at the MIIS site, but a final version of it is available via the logs of a public national security conferencehosted by the American Bar Association. Currently, Cooper is chief innovation officer at SAIC/Leidos, which is among a consortium of defense technology firms including Booz Allen Hamilton and others contracted to develop NSA surveillance capabilities.

The Highlands Forum briefing for the NSA chief was commissioned under contract by the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, and based on concepts developed at previous Forum meetings. It was presented to Gen. Alexander at a “closed session” of the Highlands Forum moderated by MIIS Cysec director, Dr. Itamara Lochard, at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington DC.

SAIC/Leidos’ Jeffrey Cooper (middle), a founding member of the Pentagon’s Highlands Forum, listening to Phil Venables (right), senior partner at Goldman Sachs, at the 2010 Forum session on cyber-deterrence at the CSIS

Like Rumsfeld’s IO roadmap, Cooper’s NSA briefing described “digital information systems” as both a “great source of vulnerability” and “powerful tools and weapons” for “national security.” He advocated the need for US cyber intelligence to maximize “in-depth knowledge” of potential and actual adversaries, so they can identify “every potential leverage point” that can be exploited for deterrence or retaliation. “Networked deterrence” requires the US intelligence community to develop “deep understanding and specific knowledge about the particular networks involved and their patterns of linkages, including types and strengths of bonds,” as well as using cognitive and behavioural science to help predict patterns. His paper went on to essentially set out a theoretical architecture for modelling data obtained from surveillance and social media mining on potential “adversaries” and “counterparties.”

A year after this briefing with the NSA chief, Michele Weslander Quaid — another Highlands Forum delegate — joined Google to become chief technology officer, leaving her senior role in the Pentagon advising the undersecretary of defense for intelligence. Two months earlier, the Defense Science Board (DSB) Task Force on Defense Intelligence published its report on Counterinsurgency (COIN), Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (IRS) Operations. Quaid was among the government intelligence experts who advised and briefed the Defense Science Board Task Force in preparing the report. Another expert who briefed the Task Force was Highlands Forum veteran Linton Wells. The DSB report itself had been commissioned by Bush appointee James Clapper, then undersecretary of defense for intelligence — who had also commissioned Cooper’s Highlands Forum briefing to Gen. Alexander. Clapper is now Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, in which capacity he lied under oath to Congress by claiming in March 2013 that the NSA does not collect any data at all on American citizens.

Michele Quaid’s track record across the US military intelligence community was to transition agencies into using web tools and cloud technology. The imprint of her ideas are evident in key parts of the DSB Task Force report, which described its purpose as being to “influence investment decisions” at the Pentagon “by recommending appropriate intelligence capabilities to assess insurgencies, understand a population in their environment, and support COIN operations.”

The report named 24 countries in South and Southeast Asia, North and West Africa, the Middle East and South America, which would pose “possible COIN challenges” for the US military in coming years. These included Pakistan, Mexico, Yemen, Nigeria, Guatemala, Gaza/West Bank, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, among other “autocratic regimes.” The report argued that “economic crises, climate change, demographic pressures, resource scarcity, or poor governance could cause these states (or others) to fail or become so weak that they become targets for aggressors/insurgents.” From there, the “global information infrastructure” and “social media” can rapidly “amplify the speed, intensity, and momentum of events” with regional implications. “Such areas could become sanctuaries from which to launch attacks on the US homeland, recruit personnel, and finance, train, and supply operations.”

The imperative in this context is to increase the military’s capacity for “left of bang” operations — before the need for a major armed forces commitment — to avoid insurgencies, or pre-empt them while still in incipient phase. The report goes on to conclude that “the Internet and social media are critical sources of social network analysis data in societies that are not only literate, but also connected to the Internet.” This requires “monitoring the blogosphere and other social media across many different cultures and languages” to prepare for “population-centric operations.”

The Pentagon must also increase its capacity for “behavioral modeling and simulation” to “better understand and anticipate the actions of a population” based on “foundation data on populations, human networks, geography, and other economic and social characteristics.” Such “population-centric operations” will also “increasingly” be needed in “nascent resource conflicts, whether based on water-crises, agricultural stress, environmental stress, or rents” from mineral resources. This must include monitoring “population demographics as an organic part of the natural resource framework.”

Other areas for augmentation are “overhead video surveillance,” “high resolution terrain data,” “cloud computing capability,” “data fusion” for all forms of intelligence in a “consistent spatio-temporal framework for organizing and indexing the data,” developing “social science frameworks” that can “support spatio-temporal encoding and analysis,” “distributing multi-form biometric authentication technologies [“such as fingerprints, retina scans and DNA samples”] to the point of service of the most basic administrative processes” in order to “tie identity to all an individual’s transactions.” In addition, the academy must be brought in to help the Pentagon develop “anthropological, socio-cultural, historical, human geographical, educational, public health, and many other types of social and behavioral science data and information” to develop “a deep understanding of populations.”

A few months after joining Google, Quaid represented the company in August 2011 at the Pentagon’s Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) Customer and Industry Forum. The forum would provide “the Services, Combatant Commands, Agencies, coalition forces” the “opportunity to directly engage with industry on innovative technologies to enable and ensure capabilities in support of our Warfighters.” Participants in the event have been integral to efforts to create a “defense enterprise information environment,” defined as “an integrated platform which includes the network, computing, environment, services, information assurance, and NetOps capabilities,” enabling warfighters to “connect, identify themselves, discover and share information, and collaborate across the full spectrum of military operations.” Most of the forum panelists were DoD officials, except for just four industry panelists including Google’s Quaid.

DISA officials have attended the Highlands Forum, too — such as Paul Friedrichs, a technical director and chief engineer of DISA’s Office of the Chief Information Assurance Executive.

Knowledge is Power

Given all this it is hardly surprising that in 2012, a few months after Highlands Forum co-chair Regina Dugan left DARPA to join Google as a senior executive, then NSA chief Gen. Keith Alexander was emailing Google’s founding executive Sergey Brin to discuss information sharing for national security. In those emails, obtained under Freedom of Information by investigative journalist Jason Leopold, Gen. Alexander described Google as a “key member of [the US military’s] Defense Industrial Base,” a position Michele Quaid was apparently consolidating. Brin’s jovial relationship with the former NSA chief now makes perfect sense given that Brin had been in contact with representatives of the CIA and NSA, who partly funded and oversaw his creation of the Google search engine, since the mid-1990s.

In July 2014, Quaid spoke at a US Army panel on the creation of a “rapid acquisition cell” to advance the US Army’s “cyber capabilities” as part of the Force 2025 transformation initiative. She told Pentagon officials that “many of the Army’s 2025 technology goals can be realized with commercial technology available or in development today,” re-affirming that “industry is ready to partner with the Army in supporting the new paradigm.” Around the same time, most of the media was trumpeting the idea that Google was trying to distance itself from Pentagon funding, but in reality, Google has switched tactics to independently develop commercial technologies which would have military applications the Pentagon’s transformation goals.

Yet Quaid is hardly the only point-person in Google’s relationship with the US military intelligence community.

One year after Google bought the satellite mapping software Keyhole from CIA venture capital firm In-Q-Tel in 2004, In-Q-Tel’s director of technical assessment Rob Painter — who played a key role in In-Q-Tel’s Keyhole investment in the first place — moved to Google. At In-Q-Tel, Painter’s work focused on identifying, researching and evaluating “new start-up technology firms that were believed to offer tremendous value to the CIA, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and the Defense Intelligence Agency.” Indeed, the NGA had confirmed that its intelligence obtained via Keyhole was used by the NSA to support US operations in Iraq from 2003 onwards.

A former US Army special operations intelligence officer, Painter’s new job at Google as of July 2005 was federal manager of what Keyhole was to become: Google Earth Enterprise. By 2007, Painter had become Google’s federal chief technologist.

That year, Painter told the Washington Post that Google was “in the beginning stages” of selling advanced secret versions of its products to the US government. “Google has ramped up its sales force in the Washington area in the past year to adapt its technology products to the needs of the military, civilian agencies and the intelligence community,” the Post reported. The Pentagon was already using a version of Google Earth developed in partnership with Lockheed Martin to “display information for the military on the ground in Iraq,” including “mapping out displays of key regions of the country” and outlining “Sunni and Shiite neighborhoods in Baghdad, as well as US and Iraqi military bases in the city. Neither Lockheed nor Google would say how the geospatial agency uses the data.” Google aimed to sell the government new “enhanced versions of Google Earth” and “search engines that can be used internally by agencies.”

White House records leaked in 2010 showed that Google executives had held several meetings with senior US National Security Council officials. Alan Davidson, Google’s government affairs director, had at least three meetings with officials of the National Security Council in 2009, including White House senior director for Russian affairs Mike McFaul and Middle East advisor Daniel Shapiro. It also emerged from a Google patent application that the company had deliberately been collecting ‘payload’ data from private wifi networks that would enable the identification of “geolocations.” In the same year, we now know, Google had signed an agreement with the NSA giving the agency open-ended access to the personal information of its users, and its hardware and software, in the name of cyber security — agreements that Gen. Alexander was busy replicating with hundreds of telecoms CEOs around the country.

Thus, it is not just Google that is a key contributor and foundation of the US military-industrial complex: it is the entire Internet, and the wide range of private sector companies — many nurtured and funded under the mantle of the US intelligence community (or powerful financiers embedded in that community) — which sustain the Internet and the telecoms infrastructure; it is also the myriad of start-ups selling cutting edge technologies to the CIA’s venture firm In-Q-Tel, where they can then be adapted and advanced for applications across the military intelligence community. Ultimately, the global surveillance apparatus and the classified tools used by agencies like the NSA to administer it, have been almost entirely made by external researchers and private contractors like Google, which operate outside the Pentagon.

Today, the citizenry polices itself, and the herd moves as one body. Even the surveillance of innocent citizens by the state is brushed off as a necessary evil. Unfortunately when it is pointed out to them that their ability to move freely is eroded they tend to walk away or tune out because they are not comfortable hearing that we have gone from Democracy to despotism.

Power has been so far removed from the people by those with money and influence that most see any type of political move as a planned attempt at a power grab from our so called leaders.

It is hard to prove that such a power grab exists or that the World order is about to be established because it is not clearly in the public dialogue or the grand narrative. So what we are faced with is being a lonely “Paul Revere” warning people we see form day to day that there are changes ahead. Some changes will be so devastating that they will direct the way we live for the rest of our lives.

We must now tell ourselves that our institutions, our traditions, the barriers that protect us from absolute and authoritarian powers, have been broken down.

I admit it doesn’t seem to happening all at once but the foundation for a solid freedom and democracy is being dismantled a brick at a time. The separation of powers has already been annihilated. It is the silent fascism, not yet marching down your street or pounding upon your door in the dead of night. But it is here, and it is laying deep psychological roots.

Abraham Lincoln once said,

“The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”

Lincoln’s words were deeply rooted in the aspect of civil war. They are also paraphrased by Barack Obama in many of his speeches. Now perhaps you can see why it seems so evident that revolution is in the air. That change will not come only by the stroke of the President’s pen. It will come by the actions of people who are no longer capable of living in impossible conditions.

Even Though Lincoln advised us that new thinking is an imperative when making revolutionary changes in a country that seems to be out of control, the ability to do so is often laden heavy with obstacles and problems because there are people who absolutely do not what your message to be heard. They are paid great sums of money to impart information that benefits the global order and pushes the continued agenda of unparalleled corruption that we hear about every day.

We read about it on the internet, we trust independent journalists to inform us, and yet the mainstream avoids adding any kind of organized retort to the general operations of government.

It is this policy of imparting dishonest propaganda that thwarts liberty and even taints the very purpose of our right to free speech and free press.

For many years we have known that not only does the NSA and other alphabet agencies spy on our internet conversations, they also move our conversations in a subtle way. It was confirmed in recent years that the U.S. Military has been manipulating social media by using fake identities to influence conversations and spread pro-American propaganda. It’s called “Online Persona Management Services.” Under the Centcom contract, it allows the creation of up to 10 fake online personas, known as “sock puppets,” for every service man or woman working on the program.”

Sock puppets as the military calls them have been called trolls in social media. A troll simply sets up a fake Facebook account, makes up a name, puts up a few pictures to make it look as though they are legitimate participators is social media.

They are more than likely special psy-ops agents who are there to discredit anyone who post what can be determine to be an anti-government slogan or an anti war statement.

Its purpose is to control free speech according to an article that appeared in the Guardian titled Revealed: US spy operation that manipulates social media: “The project has been likened by web experts to China’s attempts to control and restrict free speech on the internet. Critics are likely to complain that it will allow the US military to create a false consensus in online conversations, crowd out unwelcome opinions and smother commentaries or reports that do not correspond with its own objectives.”

According to Centcom, their only objective is to counter extremists and enemy propaganda outside of the U.S., saying that it would be unlawful to address U.S. audiences.

The Pentagon already spends four billion dollars per year to influence public opinion, and the DOD spends hundreds of millions on information campaigns in countless countries occupied by the U.S. military.

But, perhaps even more disturbing than all of this is fact that the CIA has infiltrated the biggest press institutions since the early 1950s. One has to look no further than Operation Mockingbird – a secret CIA campaign to spread disinformation and false stories to foreign governments during the cold war. The CIA did this by manipulating the media into focusing on propaganda, sabotage, and subversion.

It was later revealed in Congressional hearings consisted of literally paying off editors and reporters and most mainstream news outlets: the New York Times, CBS, Washington Post, Newsweek, AP, Reuters, and countless others.

That is not all, you can go back to 2003 and dig up the fact that the Pentagon’s strategies of Psy Ops were transitioning to an “Info war Operations Roadmap” to “dominate” the electronic media spheres, and soon thereafter we learned the Bush Administration invested 1.6 billion into fake news and targeted psychological warfare broadcasts to synthesize Washington’s propaganda line for both domestic and foreign audiences.

These strategies were put into place immediately after the attacks of 9/11. The citizens of the United States including members of the foreign press agencies have always been the target of advanced psychological warfare and disinformation, much of it going unquestioned into the grand narrative.

“U.S defense, Intel and homeland security officials are constructing a parallel world. Where the majority of sheep can be swayed into the coercion of giving up their sovereignty for the plans and visions of the elite Globalist order.”

There are others that see the world differently and attempt to describe the mounting evidence of despotism without facing dire consequences.

The technocracy has provided for everyone a fountain of information that is intentionally given for an action and a solution.

Information on leaks, whistleblowers, false flags, all are controlled in order to little by little spark civil upheaval, reveal who we consider enemies or undesirables, changes in civil liberties, and provide misdirection.

Entertainment is also directed by the state department and the DOD. Movies like American Sniper and Zero dark thirty provide pop heroes with even bigger mythologies written about them. Your video entertainment and gaming provides predictive war exercises and simulation.

As the surveillance net has been rebooted and cast across the globe it is important to visit and examine all portals that provide information that can lead to psychological warfare operations, the provide the brainwash needed to accept immoral concepts that would get you marching towards the globalist state.

The previous administration was accused of fostering nightmare scenarios in order to facilitate a crisis to maintain two wars. These wars were unnecessary and have placed our economy in the red. They have also placed this country at a higher risk for future attacks.

The Obama administration now has not really created any new nightmares; however they have been able to keep up the pitch of unnecessary dread amongst the populace. This most definitely is not progress.

Keeping us under the gun with the Jade Helm 15 exercises and the psy-op that ISIS is just over the border or are here among us and the constant goading of Islam by Muslim haters is enough to keep the monkeys occupied with worry and cognitive dissonance.

We are told that homeland security are looking for “heretical operatives” that seem to be playing for a right wing extremist conspiracy, although many of the so called protesters seem to be moderate democrats that have lost their faith in Barack Obama’s dogmatic prose.

When the mind loses control out of fear sometimes we begin to see a form of voodoo take hold and soon we see many people act as if they were a deer in the headlights.

They will believe almost anything. This is what has been called by Hitler and others “The Big Lie.”

Adolph Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf:

“In the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.”

Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.”

When lies are told to inflict dread or harm there is also that progression which leads to betrayal. Where promises that are made are easily broken and you are convinced that it is up to you to be an apologist for that betrayal. In a sense you develop Stockholm syndrome and you become a willing slave to your master.

It is common for People to get deeply attached to their beliefs, and form emotional attachments that get wrapped up in their personal identity and sense of morality, irrespective of the facts of the matter. They have so many things that okay a part in their decisions. From patriotism to religious upbringing to political ideology. Their inferred justification is creating cognitive dissonance. Left unchecked and with the negative thought forms being generated by authorities we can only await the moment where the powder keg will see its spark. Social wars can lead to civil wars and various “mobs” could spring up creating an uncontrolled despotism.

There are many who are suggesting that the United States is well on the way to martial law. This means that not only would we see the increase in police forces, we would also see private Military forces being hired and the National guard being deputized as law enforcement as well. People are economic budgets being depleted and the threat for pandemic on the horizon. This can create subtle panic and little by little other people are beginning to wake up and see the psy-op…